On a sunny Sunday in late August, live jazz percolated through Georgia Brown’s, which had been serving gumbo and grits in the shadow of the White House since 1993. The brunch crowd was so large, and so hungry, that the restaurant ran out of food.
Around 7 p.m., last call sounded for drink orders — and for Georgia Brown’s.
“I just felt like the captain of the Titanic,” said the co-owner Ayanna Brown. Between rising operational costs and dwindling customer traffic since the pandemic, she couldn’t see a way forward.
For three decades, Georgia Brown’s was a vibrant culinary symbol of the era when Washington was the nation’s first large majority-Black city, dishing out Lowcountry cuisine to K Street power brokers and tourists from Kentucky alike.
Among its regulars was Marion S. Barry Jr., the four-term mayor. Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a civil-rights leader and top aide to President Bill Clinton, held court over lunch. A year after the restaurant opened, The Washington Post described it as “a picture of Washington as it would like to be: sophisticated, prosperous, effortlessly interracial,” citing guests like Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Ted Koppel and the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
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The post Is This the End of an Era for Soul Food in Washington? appeared first on New York Times.
